Parkour enthusiasts make daredevil urban stunts look easy
A pair of human spider monkeys stood on a wall, eyeing the top of another wall about eight feet away.
“Do it,” Jaret Salas said. “That’s huge.”
“I think I could to it,” Josh Shinavier said. “But it’s the mental obstacle.”
These two parkour enthusiasts met earlier this week at Fort Marcy Park to throw their bodies around. To the relief of a gawking reporter nearby taking notes, neither tried that particular precision jump. Salas did a flip off the stage instead, while Shinavier hustled in different directions, using his hands to vault up and over the stone obstacles of varying heights scattered around the amphitheater.
Parkour (rhymes with “door”) is an art and a sport. Salas described it as “getting from Point A to Point B as fast and efficiently as you can.” It combines running, gymnastics and problem solving. Participants are called traceurs, and they string together leaps, vaults and rolls. (The epic foot chase between James Bond and a bomb maker at the start of 2006’s “Casino Royale” — up and through a busy construction site — is parkour at its most extreme.)
Where we see a kids’ playground or an alley or an empty stadium, traceurs see a canvas.
Shinavier is a 31-year-old Web developer at Knowledge Reef Systems. For him, he said, “parkour’s just fun. It has a lot of the same qualities as martial arts.” Shinavier has tried to find other traceurs using Internet meet-up groups, but he hasn’t had much luck in Santa Fe. Parkour is more popular in Spokane, Wash., where he’s from.
He started parkour three years ago after watching it in action online.
“You could say this is a passion for me,” he said. “It’s my only sport, and I do it every day.”
Salas is a student at the University of New Mexico, home in Santa Fe for the summer. He’s a nut for parkour, training twice weekly in gymnastics to expand his skills.
“I got into gymnastics a long time ago,” Salas said. “When I was 5, my mom put me in it because I would climb all the door frames, and they started breaking. She needed a place I could go climb around, and one of our friends recommended gymnastics for me. But I quit when I was 11.”
Now, Salas has his sights set on Japan, where the television show “Ninja Warrior” (which airs in America on the G4 network) is filmed. In it, competitors from all over the world compete in obstacle courses with ridiculous tests of agility and strength — flying leaps, wall climbing, etc.
“The first time I saw it,” Salas said of the show, “I was like ... ‘That’s what I’m meant to do.’”
Getting on the show means submitting an audition tape, and the 19-year-old Salas can’t do that until he’s 21 — to his chagrin.
“I’d dominate it,” he said. “I’m so ready. I’ve done so many of those courses, just made them myself. I’ve got it.”
Punch Salas’ name into Google, and a slew of MySpace videos pops up featuring various feats of his gravity defiance. There’s a running, “Matrix”-style backflip off a tree and a running front flip over eight people. He can string together flips and handsprings seemingly without end.
He’s even jumped off the roof of his friend’s two-story house.
Jumps like that can be landed with a roll. A traceur never stops honing his roll — it’s the primary means of escaping injury. Humans can leap from astonishing heights when they know how to land.
There’s also tic-tacing (kicking off a wall to go higher or grab something) and several different kinds of vaults (“monkey,” “turn,” “pop”).
Salas and Shinavier took turns employing different vaults to clear a picnic table lengthwise. Salas can spring over the top into a flip. Shinavier does a monkey vault, in which both hands make contact halfway across, and his legs swing back-to-front beneath him.
Their spider-monkey sides are always present. Most everything can be an obstacle.
“Hang around with me long enough, after a while I’ll say ‘Dude, I’m doing a side flip off that table,’” Salas said.
Where we see a picnic table, they see an excuse to go flying.
